Reddit is becoming a literal wasteland of dead accounts
When I say dead users, I mean ones who have been banned, suspended, or deleted (probably after they got banned). I see this so often when browsing posts, and it is so reflective of the problems I have been faced with as well. I'll be scrolling through a post, and sometimes unironically like 50% of all comments have the stupid little profile picture with its back turned, and when I hover over it it has either been suspended or deleted.
I have been having major issues where I've basically been permanently wiped off the platform over some bullshit permaban and can't get it appealed, and it is just shocking that so many other people are obviously just getting completely swept away by these same bullshit bans. How is Reddit going to survive like this? It's to the point where any sort of long-term engagement on the site just seems impossible because soon enough the CIA-level, all seeing AI will catch you in its net and then you're done.
Even if they miraculously change their system to not have the world's most oppressive ban system, what happens to everyone who's already been banned? Will a decent percentage of the entire platform just be fucked for life because they were on the platform at the wrong place and the wrong time?
There are always going to be bad people, but Lemmy will always be decentralized unlike Reddit. Technically you could spin up a new instance that doesn’t federate with the instances you are trying to avoid.
My pet theory is that Reddit is trying the battleship steel approach. Let me explain: Battleships sunk before the end of WWII are special, in that their steel has never been exposed to the radiation from nuclear blasts. That is important in a series of applications, so there is a market for that kind of steel, and obviously it's a very limited resource.
Reddit has one of the biggest collections of purely human-generated text that is not domain-specific. That is an incredibly valuable resource, especially now that we know that LLMs hallucinate worse if they are fed LLM-generated content.
I am thinking Reddit is planning to sell that text for the long haul, until changes in language and technology make the content irrelevant. What actually happens on the platform is not important anymore, as long as it doesn't cause the ire of the powerful.
In fact, at this point, Reddit has a vested incentive in making the Internet worse, which means banning real humans from Reddit, too. Current Reddit content is not valuable, because of course it contains lots of bot generation, so making it visibly worse is a quick way to make the old content more valuable.
Basically, the company plans on getting rich on the backs of yesterday's you and I.
I just stopped using Reddit after they broke all the good mobile apps. But your comment makes me think that I should log on and run one of those scripts to overwrite my old comments with garbage.
Good luck finding one that works. I ended up spending weeks deleting every one of my comments that I could find by hand. I couldn't even go back more than two years or so, but I did the best I could.
Reddit is approaching Myspace levels of out-of-touch. But that's to be expected. Reddit sold out and went public corporation. That means everything that they do is 100% centered around making profit for shareholders. A board of rich assholes listen to the same tech assholes that killed off every single other media platform in existence. Why? To make a buck. To squeeze the penny so hard, at the expense of content, users, posts, subreddits, that the penny squeezes out an extra $0.0000001.
Content is ruined, but who cares? Another nerd will come along and make another one. Businessmen don't care about the content of a bunch of randos. They care about gutting everything and selling pieces of it off for as much as possible, then eventually selling it off to a control-freak billionaire.
So I get what you're saying, but unfortunately Reddit hasn't reached Myspace levels of dead yet. It's still the 9th most visited website in the whole world, and I unfortunately don't think that's gonna change anytime soon
Yeah, I was permabanned from Reddit, just for saying, "stomp Nazis." After this, I deleted the app entirely. I had issues prior to this. Posts I had carefully written and spent time writing, were deleted for using the word "target," and the word, "shoot." Both posts had zilch to do with guns or violence. Saying, "oh, shoot" about a funny autocorrect deleted my post. All this censorship, but somehow right wing trolls were still getting away with being jerks to me?! Wtf! Now I think the app is the most heavily censored thing I have ever encountered. It's unusable, it's so censored. What am I supposed to do? Go back and say, "spank Nazis," instead? At a minimum, it would confuse the message and at worst, I'd get banned for saying that. No, I'm mad at Reddit & I'm never going back.
thats such a miniscule reason to ban someone that it makes my silly ban seem reasonable
I pissed off a mod on a large sub and got a ban for "ban evasion" (BS, i only had 1 account)
I later deleted and recreated my account to change the name I chose when I was like 13 (I kept being called a furry) and forgot to block the large sub and accidentally sent a comment when browsing r/all
at that point I was like 50/50 with Lemmy so I just hopped all the way over and it's been about a year since :)
Been here over a year, and yeah this is the place to be now. I love that if I disagree with how an admin runs their instance then I can just fuck off to an entirely different server, or even start my own.
Yeah they dont care about account age, can keep trying appeals but i never got a human response, just told that i tried to evade a subreddit ban and thats a permanent ban lol, I wish I was actually evading a ban on purpose, id feel better about the ban lol, its too much of a hassle to set up a new account and figure out how to use it on my phone without them tracking me somehow
I didn’t even try to appeal. I just nuked the account and came over here. If every comment needs to be a delusional sunshine and rainbows comment then I’m out.
Evading a ban is their version of resisting arrest lol. Fragile egos over there.
protip: 'ban evasion' is an easy generic category as no one outside of reddit admins can verify it
2 years ago I set up an account from my brand new work laptop with a fresh OS install on a network I've never used for reddit, and likely no one has ever used for reddit as it is specifically for a cluster of IoT devices in Martinique.
'Punching nazis is okay' got be banned for ban evasion within days of account creation
Same here. 12 years and over a quarter million karma. Im not gonna say I was single handedly supporting the site or anything, but how many high karma long term users can they delete before the site is just pure garbage?
I love Lemmy and Im honestly glad I got permabanned from reddit over nothing. Being here reminds me of the early days of my time on Reddit, but a bit more diverse than that version of Reddit ever was. Even though there is still a pretty heavy white/young/tech skew here as there was back in the day. It doesnt feel like that is the only demographic that is here
I know exactly what you mean. I never cared about my karma BUT old timer accounts with a lot of karma (I think I only had like 180k) shows that they’re active. Don’t you want activity?
How many of the people here are from the earlier Reddit era? Maybe that’s why it’s got a different vibe. Reddit’s actually banning the people that have conversations and create content with opinions and arguments. Constructive or not.
I know personally, I feel like a post is engaging when I go in and there are Zero comments. /s
They're going to try to push bot traffic, while keeping actual user numbers hidden. Then dump the stock before saying they banned all their users or someone leaks it. Personally I would like an investigative journalist look into their ban system and do a hit piece.
The site 15 years ago was great, yes there was trolling, you could call people a asshat, but it was still a good site. Now none of that stuff flies, no joking alowed, it's like msn comments section. They killed what made reddit great and it was never at the level of 4 chan incels. In fact there quite a few social causes that did some good, all that's gone. It's just regurgitated shit.
It's no small amount of people who have been permabanned and it's happening more and more. Some of the oldest accounts are just gone. I gave up even trying to get around it.
I had my first account for a decade. My next two didn't last a year. I don't think I'll going back. Lemmy doesn't have niche communities really quite yet but for tech news it's arrived
Yah I've been perma banned over what I don't even know, and Reddit won't even let me make another account, sadly there's more users and specific subreddits there with relevant posts that I want to engage with but I can't. I'm hoping this get worse and worse on reddit so that most of the current users jump ship to lemmy
the overmoderation not by humans is everywhere, I have to watch what I say on tiktok now, things that I thought arent even bad get misinterpreted and not appelaed occasionally and the strikes pile up, while some things that I prob shouldnt have said and should be taken down get appealed and put back up lol
Diggs relaunch is feeling like it has potential to be the same as reddit but like a temporary reset of the shitty things, I like that they have the apollo dev for the app
Not only that but if you use Reddit Enhancement Suite you can only view 100 posts before they all start duplicating. It's enough to make people like me leave the site.
I recently saw a thread about ICE where locals started to revolt and protest against ICE being in the neighbourhood. The thread is filled is "removed by reddit" comments and other propaganda account telling people basically not to rise up. Saying things like "They want violence so they can declare martial law. Don't give them what they want."
Reddit deletes posts promoting standing up for their freedoms and leaves the ones saying bend over and spread your ass cheeks.
Wow, I'm glad I left during the API debacle. Getting banned for an unpopular good-faith post is so frustrating, especially if it's about something important like Gaza.
I’m permabanned for signing in on public WiFi, and since that’s enough to get you kicked off now, I doubt they’ll have many actual human users much longer. It’s like they just want bots, and no one real.
The thing about a bot Silo is that once people catch on the spell is broken, and anyone can make one there's no moat. If they go to the bar out there well sooner or later find themselves completely irrelevant
Reddit considers the content of your posts theirs, not yours. They did not delete your posts. Even though that violates the GDPR. You should have used a bot to edit/remove the body of all your posts before deleting your account.
that doesn't delete your content, even deleting your content doesn't remove it from the servers and it can still be used for training, just not scraping
Reddit refugee here i never got my reddit account banned I just put the text I quit on its about me and left reddit (trying to find a alternative which was here on lemmy) but maybe one day it will get banned
I'm banned from lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/piracy for being 'capitalist scum' because I commented in lemmy.world/c/technology that I didn't want the Internet Archive archiving my content.
Not quite the same as a Reddit permaban, but authoritarians and orthodoxy enforcers are everywhere.
Their algo keeps permabanning me if I use their Reddit app. I used to bypass it by using patched 3rd party clients, but I'm too old for that nonsense now. I just don't post or do anything on Reddit anymore
im permabanned poster redditshitposter58. i first started reading reddit when i was about 12. by 14 i got really obsessed with the concept of "shit posting" and tried to channel it constantly, until my posting process got really bizarre and i would repeat things like "amaze balls" and "this" in my head for hours, and i would get really paranoid, start seeing things in the corners of my eyes etc, basically prodromal schizophrenia. im now on antipsychotics. i always wondered what the kind of "bad" style of reddit humor was all about; i think it's the unconscious leaking in to the conscious, what jungian theory considered to be the cause of schizophrenic and schizotypal syptoms. i would advise all people who "use" reddit to be careful because that likely means you have a predisposition to a mental illness. peace.